“When designing web applications, icons and images are used to enhance the user experience, give visual cues, and simply look sexy. For complex web apps, the quantity and resulting latency of icons and images used can greatly impact page load times…and developers, in most cases, generally try to reduce page load time with a sweet web app rather than increase it. To reduce latency in my apps, I use Image Concatenation! …The basic idea is this: Change X number of image downloads to 1 image download by making 1 big image that contains the X images.”
Link:
http://borkweb.com/story/faster-page-loads-with-image-concatenation
